OAKLAND, Calif. – It is not difficult to imagine: A shimmering new 728,000 square-foot basketball arena in downtown San Francisco, a practice facility attached, windows that overlook the ocean and the Bay Bridge on one end of the court, much like right field at the Giants’ AT&T Park. Bars and restaurants would line the area, as well as nearly seven acres of open space, just off the city’s historic Embarcadero.

If all goes according to plan, that will replace what currently sits on Pier 30-32, a section of concrete just south of the Bridge that has been slowly crumbling into the ocean. And owner Joe Lacob’s plan is to have a new stadium built for the Warriors—who play in the outdated Oracle Arena in Oakland—on the site in time to start the 2017 season.

“That has always been an aggressive timeframe,” Lacob said as part of his conversation with SN this week. “This is San Francisco and this is the Bay Area and things take a long time—there are a lot of committees and a lot of politics. But I would say we could not be doing any better than we are doing now. We have a great group of people working on it, in our staff, architects, everybody. We’re trying like heck to get there by the Fall of ’17, and I still think we are going to do it.”

There have been a number of obstacles that have prevented the project from getting underway, including resistance from neighbors in the area and from the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, a group that has slowed the progress of the new arena. But as Lacob sees it, the arena is a win for everyone involved. The project will be financed entirely by private money, he said, in order to skip over the messy business of securing public funding, which, as the decade-long slog toward a new arena in Sacramento showed, is a near-impossible proposition.

And it will bring some public utility to an unused stretch of land that will require about $150 million in repairs before the actual building of the arena and surrounding businesses begins. In all, Lacob estimates that the project will exceed $1 billion, all in private money.

“We identified what we felt was the right place to build an arena, so we picked the place that we thought was the center of the Bay Area for people to get to,” Lacob said. “We keep our East Bay fans because it is right next to the bridge, they can come over on the BART, and they will have a great experience there. We think we acquire more fans from San Francisco and Marin and the peninsula. So, I think it is centrally located from a transportation standpoint, it is just a great location. It is, unfortunately, an expensive one. There are not a lot of places to put an arena and that one is on a pier that is falling into the bay.”

There is also the matter of alienating fans in the East Bay, who have long supported the team enthusiastically, even in its leanest years. Now that the Warriors are making a push toward the top of the league, it would be difficult for fans in this area to watch the team leave.

“Some people in the East Bay, and I don’t blame them, will have pride in the local community and want to retain the Warriors here in their local community,” Lacob said. “I understand that. But we have to do what is best for the overall team, the NBA and the overall Bay Area. We are the Bay Area’s basketball team, we belong to Oakland, San Francisco, San Jose, put them in any order. I think they will find that it will be a shorter time commute for some people in the East Bay to get to that location—Highway 880 is a very crowded freeway. But it is always going to be difficult, because not everyone is going to love the new venue.”

Those who do not love it might be able to delay it, might push the opening past the ’17-’18 season. But Lacob insists that, even if that happens, the new arena will open on Pier 30-32 at some point shortly thereafter.

“If I have anything to say about it, it is,” he said. “We are going to work as hard as we can to make it happen and the odds are very high that it is going to happen.”